My brother in law told me about this guy the other day. Im sure some of you have heard about him already. I haven't done any research further than the two articles linked above. Basically, this russian guy has an infinite budget and a goal to download human consiousness out of a human brain and into a robot before 2045. IMO where there is a will and an infinite budget, there is a way. I do not write this off as impossible yet, having read only what I have. It actually sounds unsettlingly plausible so far.

So, this brings about infinite "what ifs" and all kinds of possibilities for real life science fiction plot twists if he succeeds.

If you download someone's self; that is, everything that makes them, them: their memories, their personality, their logic, their morals, their perception, everything, into a robot, does that robot become a living person?

If you destroyed the robot, would you be murdering a person?

Would/should avatars (robots with people's selves inside) be given equality in society? Can we allow them to hold public office? What if they get hacked?

Can we allow duplicates? What if someone wants 10 of themselves running around, taking care of all the tasks that seem to overwhelm a single person? What if one of the copy bots kills someone? Do we kill/destroy/scentence all of copy bots?

How do we punish/rehabilitate an avatar? Serving consecutive life sentences doesn't seem like much of a deterrent for someone who will live forever and can simply shut down for a few decades.

Think of the possibilities though. No need to Get on a plane. Just send yourself through the internet into a rental body at your destination. "Teleportation," effectively. But what If you got corrupted or hacked in transit?

If you can download from a brain to a thumb drive, can you upload from a thumb drive to a brain? Can you "overwrite" a real person?

Do you even need a real body? Apparently the russian doesn't think so; his final phase is a hologram. Would you be happy existing infinitely as a digital ghost like jar-el (superman's dad)?

It just gets crazier the more I think about it. I don't like any of the alternate endings of this "choose your own adventure" sci fi book.

Unfortunately the reality is that to fully simulate the working capacity of the average human brain in all digital it would take something equivalent to the combined processing power of somewhere around 200 million home computers to simulate our brain in real time.

Memory wise on top of that each of those 200 million PC's would have to be equipped with around 5 Tb of ram to keep up.

Theoretically doable but to power your android avatar you will need a dedicated multi gigawatt power station just for the brain to function.

Not exactly relevant being that present day processor design is fast approaching the scaling down limit plus on top of that our brains are not built like any digital system either.
Everything in our brains is built on a ever changing and adapting organic electrochemical analog parallel processing format that still has not been fully figured out.

Then on top of that our brains use neurons which in comparison to modern CPU transistors are around 10,000 nano meters in size which compared to 10 - 30 NM scale is outrageously huge but the trade off is one neuron can handle the average processing workload of a common CPU.

Plus to compound it even further we have some 100 billion of them all working together through some 1 quadrillion synaptic connections all running on about 20 watts of power.

So do I think he will be able to download his mind into a computer in 30 years?

NO! Maybe his cat though and even then to keep robo kitty powered up will likley cost a few million dollars a year just for the power bill. .

Maybe attepts to further scale down the the existing transistor technology isn't the answer. Maybe figuring out this ever changing and adapting organic electrochemical analog parallel processing format, and then replicating it, is the answer.

That's where I would put my money but then again biological based networks have been proving rather difficult to crack.

They still have a number of odd little functional quirks like the elusive memister effect that have yet to become practical to replicate in a solid state formats let a lone be able to be replicated in mass volumes on the nano scale.

Then after that is the sheer scale of size that even the most compact systems we have yet to produce take up to equal what our brains carry around.

Using the latest SSHD and RAM designs the memory core alone would likely be at least the size of a small bus which is not so big considering that the main CPU system would likely be the size of a sports stadium!

That's where I would put my money but then again biological based networks have been proving rather difficult to crack.

They still have a number of odd little functional quirks like the elusive memister effect that have yet to become practical to replicate in a solid state formats let a lone be able to be replicated in mass volumes on the nano scale.

Then after that is the sheer scale of size that even the most compact systems we have yet to produce take up to equal what our brains carry around.

Using the latest SSHD and RAM designs the memory core alone would likely be at least the size of a small bus which is not so big considering that the main CPU system would likely be the size of a sports stadium!

Click to expand...

This all sounds oddly familiar.

"Where a calculator on the ENIAC is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighs 30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and weigh only 1.5 tons." -- Popular Mechanics, 1949

We have plenty of 'what' data about the brain as a circuit but very little 'why' data and real science is lousy about answering 'why' questions from mounds of data. We are very good at shifting, filtering, enhancing past and present data patterns and then using parameters with models to create patterns that match the data. It might look very pretty on the surface and be completely wrong because it's not predictive when new patterns are seen in reality. IMO an important aspect of human consciousness and intelligence (that might be much more efficient when based on biological brain structure than just digital computer computation) is the power of memory to develop patterns from past patterns that match current and novel patterns that are then used for future expectations of events and actions. (power of prediction) This might lead up to a brain theory that we can use to construct intelligent machines but currently we still don't have a clue about a complete framework to even begin developing a good testable brain theory.http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2013/center-for-brains-minds-and-machines-0909.html

The problem, of course, turned out to be much more difficult than AI’s pioneers had imagined. In recent years, by exploiting machine learning — in which computers learn to perform tasks from sets of training examples — artificial-intelligence researchers have built special-purpose systems that can do things like interpret spoken language or play Jeopardy with great success. But according to Tomaso Poggio, the Eugene McDermott Professor of Brain Sciences and Human Behavior at MIT, “These recent achievements have, ironically, underscored the limitations of computer science and artificial intelligence. We do not yet understand how the brain gives rise to intelligence, nor do we know how to build machines that are as broadly intelligent as we are.”

How we think the brain stores those patterns in memory is being actively researched. Facial matching software is using some of these ideas today in a primitive way with feature extraction from images using sparse coding. We believe our brains are sampling data and converting it into much higher internal dimensional (few blocks in a large matrix of possible blocks) sparse coding patterns with up to 500X oversampling/over-complete coding of whats needed to reconstruct the patterns. The initial encoding of these patterns when no existing close patterns are present is expensive in energy (novelty is exciting but tiring) use when compared to the amount of energy needed retrieve and complete matching functions with them. I guess you could say our brains don't operate in a pure 3D 'reality' but have a 3D interface called consciousness that fills in the background (like missing card movements during a slight of hand trick if you don't know the trick) when it interacts with sensor data.

Imagine a process called 'group sampling' in large number of people, you're looking for something but you really don't want to test everybody if only a few have what you are looking for. So you take a sample from everybody at the same time and combine a small bit of each individual sample into a common sample and test (a sensitive test that can detect a highly diluted something). If the combined sample is negative then all the test subjects are excluded or your test missed it (zero), if the combined sample is positive (>zero) you then find clever ways to mix smaller combinations of individual samples until you concentrate and isolate the positives. So if you continue the process for different types of tests from those same samples you can generate a set of positive codes from each set of testing that describes in detail a much larger group.

It seems to fit what we see in brain scans while thinking about something but finding out how and why it works in a real brain is still a mystery so I don't think we will be downloading brains soon.

I'd be happy with a humanoid robot to clean up around my house. I don't see that happening any too soon, but give it 10-20 years, maybe. They are starting to break jobs up into bit sized pieces, like robotic eyes with processing power and facial recognition, self balancing robotic bodies, etc. It mimics the biological approach pretty closely I think.

I'd be happy with a humanoid robot to clean up around my house. I don't see that happening any too soon, but give it 10-20 years, maybe. They are starting to break jobs up into bit sized pieces, like robotic eyes with processing power and facial recognition, self balancing robotic bodies, etc. It mimics the biological approach pretty closely I think.

Unfortunately too many were found to be high maintenance, low output, very buggy, tended to make constant unpleasant whining sounds, and were generally hard to interface with at any practical level plus the manufacturers never stood behind their claims nor would take them back once acquired.

Then to top it off getting rid/disposing of your old one was usually expensive and or involved finding a sucker and convincing them that their life would be better if they had your old one.

Granted there are rumors of there being very good ones out the but then again they just might be shady ploys just to get you take someone elses off their hands for them on the cheap.